Hugo Chávez excels at fooling most of the people most of the time, never more so than when persuading Venezuela's poor that he is their mighty champion, striving with passion to improve their lot. A flashy and incorrigible, but tactically astute, populist, the Venezuelan President has used his three election victories since 1998 to wrest more and more of the levers of power away from the people. Chávistas dominate the National Assembly, his nominees run Venezuela's supreme court and the electoral commission; and his henchmen manage (or more commonly mismanage) the nationalised utilities and the all-important oil industry whose bulging revenues bankroll his “battle to build socialism”.

Politicians who forever invoke “the power of the people” are suspect. The dictatorship of the proletariat invariably hands unchecked power to the few. Mr Chávez is a former paratroop commander whose pursuit of power dates back to a failed coup attempt in 1992, and who makes no secret of wanting to stay at the top for good: until he is 95, to be precise. He visibly chafes at constitutional constraints — even though he himself wrote the rules, in the revised Constitution of 1999. Time and again Mr Chávez has bent the law and then used street power to drown the protests of his critics. On Sunday he went for broke.

To his astonishment, he lost. The Chávez spell failed to work its magic. In a referendum on a new Constitution that Mr Chávez would not have called had he not been confident of victory, 51 per cent of Venezuelans said “no”. No to handing Mr Chávez a lifelong key to the presidency; no to more “emergency” presidential powers to abridge civil liberties; no to handing him control over Venezuela's central bank and currency reserves — no, more generally, to his ancien regime “l'etat c'est moi” take on radical socialism.

Despite the State's domination of the airwaves, despite the opposition's weakness, despite Mr Chávez's talent for polarising the electorate on class lines and convincing his followers that to brook his will is treason, voters understood that the 69 constitutional changes that they were being asked to approve would turn Venezuela into a de facto dictatorship. It was, said a disaffected presidential confidant, a coup by constitutional means. People smelt a rat. Three million voters deserted the Chávez ship.

Their disaffection should hearten reformers, not least because some Chávistas went beyond abstaining to switch sides. The opposition campaign, led by students, wisely concentrated on the threat to democracy, supported some of the genuinely popular proposals, such as a probably unworkable scheme to extend social security to the informal economy, and carefully avoided turning the vote into a referendum on Mr Chávez. In victory, it has called for reconciliation, not retribution. The President has, in turn, accepted defeat with apparent good grace, astutely seeing a chance to polish his rusted democratic credentials. But he has been slowed, not stopped. After the failed 1992 coup, he said: “For now, we couldn't do it.” He used those words again yesterday, adding “this is not a defeat”. This is not a man who takes no for an answer.

This is a small first step. The opposition united round an issue; it has yet to find a leader. But autocrats, whether of Left or Right, need to appear invincible. Mr Chávez has lost that aura.